Another 1000 million years

The end?

Earth itself has got billions of years to look forward to. As long as our sun keeps shining as it does at the moment, life will continue in one form or another.

But what form might that be?

Organisms have changed to such a huge degree in the last 1000 million years (a long period of time, but just the last 10 years of our timeline) it is impossible to say what life might look like in another 1000 million years. Will there be animals? Will there be plants? Or will new kingdoms of life evolve that we cannot even dream of?

And finally, in another few billion years, the sun will become a red giant, expanding greatly in size and eventually engulfing the Earth and its inhabitants with immense heat and radiation. Life on Earth will come to an end.

But perhaps by then living organisms will have escaped the confines of the Earth and be living on other planets, perhaps under a different sun, elsewhere in the cosmos.

The timeline was written by Ian Wilkinson. Design, animations and artwork by Chris Wardle.